Gate 76

by Andrew Diamond

  I’m going to regret this. I know it.

  * * *

  I made Julia give me the key before we left the apartment, so I could lock it and do the toothpick trick again. When we get to the door, the sliver of wood is still on the deadbolt. Even so, I ask her to wait in the hall while I do a quick check of the apartment.

  She watches me and says, “You’re nervous, huh? Am I really in so much trouble?”

  “Your sister is. I just want to make sure whoever’s after her—”

  “Lomax?”

  “—doesn’t get you by mistake.”

  The apartment is clear.

  I give her the flip phone and say, “There’s only one number in the contacts. Call it. Talk in the bedroom, so you can have some privacy. I’ll be in the other room.”

  She shuts the door, and I go to the kitchen for a glass of water.

  When I get back to the couch in the main room, she opens the bedroom door, looking disappointed and a little concerned.

  “She’s not answering.”

  “Yeah. I was afraid of that. You know, she’s very uneasy right now. Just keep trying. If it rings enough times, she’ll know it’s important.” At least I hope she will. We didn’t part on the best terms, and she hasn’t answered since that damn redneck cop called her.

  Julia nods and whispers, “Yeah,” then shuts the bedroom door.

  I want to look at Anna’s phone again, but instead I’m straining to hear what’s happening behind that door. Several minutes pass, and I hear Julia sigh. How many times has she tried? Six? Ten? Is she going to give up?

  Finally, I hear the burst of emotion in her voice.

  “Anna? Oh my god!”

  * * *

  I spend the next two hours catching up on work. Leon sent about a dozen emails with info on Sheldon Brown, Franklin Dorsett, and the businesses Anna told me about. Most of them belonged to Brown, though Dorsett seemed to be slowly taking them over, just like Linnea said. Other than a big chunk of an oil-drilling services company, which he inherited, all of Dorsett’s assets once belonged to Brown. He probably won them in card games, or bought them on the cheap after Brown needed quick cash to bail himself out of gambling trouble in Las Vegas.

  In all, there are many more companies than the few Anna had mentioned. The chain of ownership for most of the businesses was hard to trace. Leon found they belong to a handful of holding companies, which in turn are owned by other holding companies, some of which are registered offshore. But with help from a paralegal over at Baker/Watson, Leon managed to dig up the legal documents that tie every one of them back to Brown and Dorsett.

  Bethany, always the librarian, has organized electronic copies of the paperwork into a searchable archive. That’s one step toward the evidence that might eventually get Anna out of hiding.

  The last email in my inbox is from Bethany. “I don’t know what you’re after, Freddy. Maybe you’ll let us in on it soon? But thanks for giving us a break from the endless background checks of the passenger list. BTW, how does this tie in?”

  I open the attachment, which is a list of donors to a super PAC called Healthy Texas. A dozen of the top fifty donors are companies owned by that maze of holding companies that Leon traced back to Brown and Dorsett. Their contributions come to over a million dollars. Way to go, Bethany!

  Who is Healthy Texas trying to put into office? I look up their ads.

  Jumbo Throckmorton.

  During all this time Julia only came out of the bedroom once. She pulled a Bible from the table where Anna stacks her mail. That was about twenty minutes into the conversation.

  She took the book back into the bedroom and began to read some vaguely familiar Psalm, changing the pronouns halfway through from male to female.

  She shall call upon me, and I will answer her. I will be with her in trouble. I will deliver her, and honor her. With long life will I satisfy her, and show her my salvation.

  Those words bring back the sight of the altar, the smell of candles and incense, the sound of hymns, and the swaying of the priest’s robes in the aisle. And my mother, in her Sunday dress, smelling of soap and shampoo, who called and called and called upon Him, never to be honored or delivered.

  As I finish scanning through all the stuff Leon and Bethany sent, Julia ends her long conversation and comes from the bedroom buzzing with energy.

  “She told me to tell you she was there to delay them,” she says.

  “What?”

  “She said Lomax brought her to San Francisco to delay two guys named Brown and Dorsett. They were stopping there for a day between Las Vegas and Hawaii, but Lomax wanted them on a different plane, two days later. So he brought Anna to Brown’s hotel room with a half ounce of cocaine and told her to keep him busy.”

  “Hey!” I point to the smart phone in her right hand. “Why are you holding that?”

  “I just got off the call.”

  “You didn’t call her from your phone, did you? I gave you the flip phone.”

  “She wouldn’t answer. I knew she’d answer if she saw my number in the caller ID, so I dialed from—” She cuts her answer short when she sees my anger rising.

  I’m about to lose my temper but… I don’t. And I don’t know why. I was going to yell at her for making a stupid mistake. If Lomax is looking for Anna, he’ll be watching the phones and email accounts of her mother, her sister, her friends, maybe even Kim Hahn, looking for contact. I was going to blurt out that she was an idiot, and then I’d spend the next three days regretting that. But something stopped me, and I’m glad I kept my mouth shut. How horrible would she feel if I told her she had just put her sister in more danger? And who’s to say Lomax even has the ability to look at the emails and phone records of her friends and family? That requires a warrant from a judge, or at least an administrative warrant, and if he’s on some solo mission to hunt her down, he’s not going to expose his plans by filling out the legal paperwork.

  The fact that he hasn’t shown up here yet, despite the GPS signal from Anna’s phone—that makes me think he doesn’t have access to her accounts. But I’m not going to bet on that. I’m certainly not going to risk Julia’s life on it. He’s been here once already to pick up Anna’s journals. He called her phone too. He may have been calling it for days, and now that he finally got an answer, he might come by again. I don’t want Julia to be here when he shows up.

  “Do I really need to go to that marshal’s house?” Julia asks.

  “Yes. You do.”

  “I want to shower before we go.”

  “Make it quick. It’s already past midnight.”

  She goes back into the bedroom and takes some clothes from Anna’s dresser. In a minute, I hear the bathroom door close. Then I look again at the list of businesses Sheldon Brown was hiding in those holding companies. They’re spread all over Texas. I can hit a bunch of them in one big loop if I head west from Dallas to Odessa, then down to San Antonio and the Gulf Coast, back up through Houston to Dallas. That’ll be a few days of driving.

  I book a flight to Dallas on my phone, leaving in eight hours.

  This has been another long day, and I’m wearing down. It’s quiet in here, dead quiet, and I’m wondering why that’s wrong. Then I hear the shower go on. She’s been in the bathroom for fifteen minutes, and she just turns the water on now? Christ! What does “make it quick” actually mean to a woman?

  I tilt my head back and let out a breath of frustration and tell myself to be patient. Usually when I tell myself that, I become less patient. But maybe I’m losing my fire, or just getting old. Or maybe the intensity of that encounter with Anna the other night took more out of me than I thought. I can’t quite muster the emotion to get pissed off over a fifteen-minute delay. Tonight I will be patient. Twenty minutes and we’ll be out of here.

  I take Anna’s phone from my pocket, take it out of airplane mode and check for recent calls. None. No texts either. I tap the email app and look at wh
at’s come in since the day of the crash. Nothing but spam.

  My eyes are burning. The splashing of the shower is like rain in the quiet night, and the little humming noises Julia makes in there are like the ones my mother used to make when she’d wash her hair. The moisture seeping beneath the bathroom door carries the scent of her shampoo.

  I close my eyes for a minute. Just one minute…

  32

  The sound of Anna’s phone ringing jolts me awake. I couldn’t have been asleep more than thirty seconds. The shower is still running. It’s that same number again. 999–999–9999. And there’s a shadow beneath the door. He’s out in the hall, listening to it ring. He knows the phone is in here.

  I get up off the couch. My mind is foggy, and my body is heavy and slow. I walk quietly into the kitchen and find a three-inch paring knife. There’s probably a bigger one in the drawer, but I don’t want to risk opening it and making a sound. Wake up, Freddy! Shake it off.

  And then—the phone! I left it on the couch.

  I consider going back for it, but it’s still ringing. If I pick it up and bring it with me, the ringing will lead him right to me. I don’t want that. I’d rather surprise him. I could turn the ringer off, but… No time. Stay put, Freddy.

  The phone quiets down and then I hear the key slide into the lock. I turn off the kitchen light.

  If he’s opened the door, he’s done it too quietly for me to hear. His first step into the apartment has to be on the bare wood floor. The next step will be on the rug, and I won’t be able to hear that one. But so far, I hear nothing from him. The bedroom door is open just a crack, and the sound of the shower comes through just loudly enough to mask his quiet footsteps.

  I’m straining to listen, and then I hear the click of the hallway door shutting. Is he in?

  For a few seconds, there’s silence, then a little sigh, like he let out his breath. I wonder if he’s high. If he’s on coke, he might be more violent, or just more rash. His senses might be more acute, his reflexes quicker. That could put me at a disadvantage. As if a knife against a gun isn’t disadvantage enough. I should have gotten her out of here earlier.

  There! That creak must be the bedroom door. He hears the shower. He has her right where he wants her. Maybe that puts him at ease, knowing his job won’t be too hard.

  I look out through the kitchen door. The main room is empty, and Anna’s phone is gone. That’s a big chunk of evidence, and I need to get it back.

  The bedroom door is open. I cross the main room, and just as I reach the bedroom, the light inside gets brighter and the shower gets louder. I come in three steps behind him as the steam billows out through the half-open bathroom door.

  Julia’s half-mumbling, half-singing in there. He’s got the door all the way open, and I’m four feet behind him now, the sound of the shower masking my steps. He lets out a laugh and says, “You stupid cunt!” Then he rips open the shower curtain.

  Julia shrieks as I plunge the knife into the lower right side of Lomax’s back. He screams and jerks awkwardly back, his right hand going to the wound as the back of his head smashes my face. For a split second, everything goes black. My legs wobble, and I see stars. In the ring, I developed an instinct to stay upright after blows like that.

  We stagger backward. I’m in the bedroom and he’s in the bathroom doorway. I get him in a sleeper hold, with my right forearm pulling on his windpipe, and my left arm pushing from behind like scissors. I press his left side against the doorframe so he can’t reach his gun.

  Of course, that’s the first thing he does. Goes for the gun. When he can’t get it, he balls up his right fist and swings back at my crotch. I’m standing a little to his right, and he lands a good hard shot that makes me buckle forward. As I slide to the left to avoid another one of those, my grip on his throat weakens. That kind of blow takes some of the starch out of you. As I move left, my hip hits the knife in his back and he screams. I still have a hold on his throat, but this guy is all muscle. Strangling that thick neck is like trying to choke a tree.

  He takes a swat at me, his right hand coming backward over his shoulder. I see the big thumb sticking out, and I let out a yell when it goes into my eye. That hurt worse than the crotch shot, and it makes me mad. I put every ounce of strength into the chokehold, cutting off the blood flow as well as the oxygen, and he finally starts to wilt.

  I keep the hold on for a few seconds after his legs give out, after he’s sagging and I have to support his weight. Only when I let him go do I notice Julia standing there, holding a thick white towel in front of her, watching horrorstruck, with big wide eyes.

  “Put some clothes on,” I say.

  I drag Lomax into the bedroom and drop him facedown on the floor. I take his gun, and I find Anna’s phone in the pocket of his jacket. I put the gun and the phone on the dresser, and then give him a good hard kick in the crotch. Not very sporting, but then neither is beating up women.

  I pull him up onto the bed, facedown, so the knife wound doesn’t bleed all over it, and I give him a few hard left hooks under the ribs. His body doesn’t react to the blows. It’s like hitting the heavy bag: a big lump of inert matter. Then I work the right side the same way. He might not feel these now, but he’ll feel them when he wakes up. And no one will be able to see his bruises in the morning. It’ll be our little secret. That’s a trick my daddy taught me. Hide the evidence, so the crime is invisible.

  Then there’s a hand on my shoulder, someone behind me.

  “Stop it, Freddy! You’re going to kill him.” It’s Julia.

  “That’s right,” I say. “I am. Put some clothes on, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Freddy, stop!” She’s not used to seeing this kind of thing.

  “Put some clothes on and open the hallway door.”

  She wraps the towel around herself and opens the door. I pull the knife out of Lomax’s back and throw it in the bathroom sink. Then I grab him by the shoulders and drag him out and down the hall, facedown to keep his blood off the carpet. I lug him down the back stairs and into the alley, where I prop him up next to the dumpster, just like I did with Chuck DiLeo. As he comes to, I give him a kick in the gut, one under the ribs, and one up under the chin that knocks him senseless. He slumps over sideways and I’m about to stomp that pretty face of his into hamburger meat when a police car rolls past the end of the alley with its flashers on.

  I know what this is about.

  I give Lomax another boot to the side of the head—hopefully good for a three-day headache—then walk back toward the building. Only I can’t get in the back door. I go back to Lomax and fish the keys out of his pocket. Anna’s apartment key, and probably his own too.

  On the way out of the alley, I wipe the blood from my face onto my shirt. He smashed my nose pretty good with the back of his head when I stabbed him.

  When I get around to the front of the building, the patrol car is there with its flashers on, and the cop is just getting out—a tall, skinny black guy with a moustache. I know him. D’Andre Tomlinson.

  “You get a call about a domestic disturbance?” I ask, wiping the blood from my hands onto my black pants.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “That was me,” I say.

  Tomlinson looks me up and down, then calls for backup on his shoulder radio.

  “There’s a woman up there,” he says. “The neighbor heard her scream.”

  “That’s right.”

  “She OK?”

  “She’s OK.” I press the buzzer for 204. “Ask her yourself.”

  “What happened?” Tomlinson asks.

  “Who’s there?” Julia asks through the speaker.

  “Officer Tomlinson, Metropolitan Police. Everything OK up there?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “You wanna buzz me in?” Tomlinson says.

  The buzzer goes, and we go in. I explain to Tomlinson that Julia came to get some things from her sister’s apartment. She asked
me to meet her because she was scared. Her sister was a prostitute and might have had an angry pimp. Someone came into the apartment with a key, maybe her pimp coming to collect money. He went after Julia and I had to hurt him.

  When we get inside, he asks Julia what happened. She tells essentially the same story. She came to get some of her sister’s things. She was in the shower. A guy came in and ripped open the shower curtain. He and I fought.

  I go to the bedroom while she and Tomlinson continue to talk. I grab Lomax’s gun and Anna’s phone from the dresser. The gun goes under my belt. The phone goes into my pocket. Then I check the sink. The knife is gone, and there’s no trace of blood in the sink, but there are drops on the bathroom floor, on the bedroom rug, and a couple big smears on the white bedspread.

  Tomlinson comes into the bedroom to have a look as Julia buzzes in the second cop. Tomlinson examines the bloodstains and I can see him do a quick calculation in his head. Definitely not enough there for a murder. More like a bloody nose or a split lip.

  “You hit the guy?” he asks.

  “In the nose,” I lie. “He’s a bleeder. And I put a gash above his eye too.” That’s also a lie, but I have to account for the blood.

  He looks at the drying blood beneath my nose, then says, “Let me see your hands.”

  I show him my hands, which bear the marks of many hard blows, along with a few scrapes and bruises from the work I just did.

  He shines his flashlight in my left eye and asks, “What’d he put in your eye?”

  “His thumb.”

  “Why were you outside?”

  “I chased the guy. He got out after he put his thumb in my eye.”

  “Why would you chase an intruder?”

  “I wanted to kill him.”

  “OK,” Tomlinson says with a nod. He knows me well enough to take that statement at face value.

  “What’s the guy look like?”

  I describe Lomax, and Tomlinson seems a little suspicious.

  “That doesn’t sound like a pimp,” he says.

  “Maybe it was one of her clients.”